I’m a legal assistant, so I work days (8:30–5:30 Monday-Friday). I like it quite a bit most days. I definitely like the pay, which is better than I expected for my first job out of college. It pays about $9K more per year than similar jobs I was applying for. Plus, I have my own office, which I also didn’t expect.

I spend my days drafting letters, listening to attorney dictations, managing their emails, filing state and federal pleadings, helping them prepare for depositions and meetings and complaint responses, and maintaining case files. I work for school attorneys, so we mainly represent school districts in the state. I work for one attorney that specializes in special education matters and another that does a lot of litigation, so it’s a nice balance. Any interesting stories I have can’t be aired all over the internet, but things do get pretty scandalous in our cases (students having sex with teachers, teachers hitting students, student discipline/suspension/expulsion issues, and more crazy ass parents than you could imagine).

It’s a good job. It can sometimes be tedious or frustrating, but I’m very grateful that I got it and I have no plans to leave anytime soon. I also like the people that I work with.

I’m a freelance audio-video producer/editor, and work anytime I like. Sometimes that’s the dead of night, sometimes in the morning, and sometimes in the evenings depending on the workload, and best best of all… sometimes not at all.

CNC machinist; technically, I work four 10-hour shifts a week (three-day weekends!), but often do 12s because the pay is good enough to make time-and-a-half worthwhile.

At my current job, I no longer do programming; we have a department for that. But unlike many who call themselves “machinists” while just loading parts and hitting Cycle Start, I also set the machines up so that less-skilled people can just load-and-go, and advise engineering of technical issues with their programs, tooling, or procedures. At my old shop, I actually did most of the programming myself, along with cutter selection, and often did everything from blueprint to finished product.

I have a few interesting stories, but most wouldn’t make sense to anybody who doesn’t know the difference between G2 and G3 or know the “joy” of Inconel 718. Such is the nature of technical jobs. Some people seem impressed by cutting huge chunks of metal into precision parts, but after a few years it’s almost boring. I prefer it that way though since “interesting” often means flying metal and/or machine repair bills; a bad crash can easily cost $60–200k to repair, and there’s a reason we have good death/disability insurance. What I do isn’t easy, I just make it look that way.

I work at a grocery store. I stock dairy freight and occasionally other grocery items. It’s a decent job.

They are sending me down to New Hampshire this weekend to help out during the Market Basket fiasco. The stores down there are pulling in 2 to 2.5 million a week because of it. My two shifts down there will all be overtime with paid travel, mileage and paid hotel room.

I work in a remote office. My company is located in another state, but there are a few of us remote workers who like to have an office to go to. Working from home is an option, but I just don’t have the space.

I’m not exactly working with bleeding edge technologies, which in a way is a good thing. I am feeling particularly old lately. Software is for the young – people with sharp minds and no kids. I’m not sure what I should (or can) do next.

My main job is teaching. I teach classes on philosophy, critical thinking, and argumentative writing. Whether I teach in the morning or the evening is mostly up to the Registrar, though I do get some input as to when I’d like to hold class. It’s a great job, really. Exactly what I wanted to be doing. And once I’m finished with my PhD, I’ll be able to get some decent pay out of it.

I don’t have a lot of fun stories about teaching that aren’t “you had to be there” moments, but it is very rewarding. A lot of my students keep in touch after they take my class, so I get to watch them go from confused first years to confident graduates. And I manage to convince most of them to take another philosophy class. A few have even joined the philosophy program.

a.k.a. stay at home parent. I work morning, noon and night. Sometimes the middle of the night.

I love being available for my family when they need me. I’m here when they are sick, during holidays, during vacations, and during snow days. I can help them when they feel terrible. I can take them to do fun things during vacations and holidays. I can take them to do activities/sports during the summer or after school. I get to provide a home cooked meal for them on most days. I’m available at all hours of the day when needed.

I’m a dog trainer and I generally work from 8.30am until 8.30pm, 5 days a week. I love my job, every day is different and has it’s own story. Today I was pee’d on by a very excited Old English Sheepdog for example.

Electrical Engineer. I mainly design and do system integration for data acquisition systems used in environmental and structural monitoring. I also do embedded design and some programming. I get to install this stuff in some pretty amazing places. I a weeks time I can go from being a few hundred feet underground to out on a lake working out of the side of a boat to setting up equipment out in the woods. Typically I’ll spend a couple of weeks in the office for every week out in the field. I have had many cool projects that have taken me way beyond what I learned in school. It’s been a great ride so far and plenty of fun left to be had. I do love my work.

@jerv. . . I’m the supervisor in the machine shop where I work. I basically do what you do plus deal with a dysfunctional front office that is still operating in the 80s. It would be nice to share stories with someone who knew what I was talking about when I bitch about getting 1” od x ¾” id x (. 125) wall EW HRS tube instead of the 1” od x 7/8” id x (. 062) wall EW HRS tube that I ordered or the difference between 50 ksi galvanized and st39 soft.

@Blondesjon The nice thing about doing your own hogging is that you make your own IDs; if the wall thickness is off, you have nobody to blame but yourself. As for the office, I just came from a shop that had a pay scale from the ‘80s, but at least my current employer knows what’s up. Then again, considering how demanding our largest customer is, they pretty much have to; the sort of mistakes you’re talking would lose us 96% of our business in a heartbeat.

my degree and background is in dentistry. I’m not licensed in this country and don’t feel like spending 40k to do so, so I’m a sex worker. It’s pretty fun and lucrative. I have hell funny stories about my jobs….

Up until 2012, I was a nurse. I did everything from geriatrics, cardiology, internal med, post op, ER, Home health, oncology, Hospice, research, psych, and some disaster work. Before that, I was a merchant marine officer on the Baltic, North Sea, and Med. Around Thanksgiving, 2012, I went sailing in my sloop and I never came back. I dropped the hook in Dominica for a few months, frequented Fort-de-France for charter work when the money got tight.

Up until about a month ago I spent about six months overseeing a nice hilly fruit and nut plantation on St. Lucie, with goats, sheep, chickens, a burro name Betsy, a mare named Shy, and a border collie named Sam. I made goat cheese, grew herbs, brought in the mangos and pecans, started an experimental morel mushroom cellar, and protected an experimental plot of sugar cane from Betsy’s voracious addiction to fructose.

Today I’m at a friend’s yoga clinic on the Yucatan, resting after a long, involved voyage from the southeast Caribbean to here via stops on Martinique, the Virgins, a little uninhabited paradise called Isla Alto Velo, and Haiti.

Now I enjoy long uninterrupted hours of sleep, good food, yoga, massages, hikes into the interior stumbling across abandoned temples. I teach sailing to the guests now and then, to make it look like I’m not freeloading, although my friend Andrea wants to partner up big time. She’s sweet and incredibly sexy, but I dunno. This shit always happens as soon as you think you’ve got it all figured out.

I let my license and certs slide this year, so I guess I’m retired by default. I really have no inclination to go back to the states. The boat has a few more nautical miles left in her. Work comes my way when I need it. I think I’ll stay out here for a while more.